Beschreibungen

A Companion to the American West is a rigorous, illuminating introduction to the history of the American West. Twenty-five essays by expert scholars synthesize the best and most provocative work in the field and provide a comprehensive overview of themes and historiography. Covers the culture, politics, and environment of the American West through periods of migration, settlement, and modernization Discusses Native Americans and their conflicts and integration with American settlers

Notes on Contributors viii Introduction 1William Deverell Part I Thinking Through the American West 1 The Making of the First American West and the Unmaking of Other Realms 5Stephen Aron 2 Thinking West 25Elliott West Part II Conquest and Its Patterns: The Nineteenth Century 3 Passion and Imagination in the Exploration of the American West 53James P. Ronda 4 Environment and the Nineteenth-Century West: Or, Process Encounters Place 77Andrew C. Isenberg 5 Engineering the Elephant: Industrialism and the Environment in the Greater West 93David Igler 6 Mining and the Nineteenth-Century American West 112Malcolm J. Rohrbough 7 Law and the Contact of Cultures 130Sarah Barringer Gordon 8 Native Americans in the Nineteenth-Century American West 143David Rich Lewis 9 Western Violence 162Michael A. Bellesiles 10 Bringing It All Back Home: Rethinking the History of Women and the Nineteenth-Century West 179Elizabeth Jameson 11 Empire and Liberty: Contradictions and Conflicts in Nineteenth-Century Western Political History 200Jeffrey Ostler Part III Exceptionalism or Regionalism? The Twentieth-Century American West 12 African Americans in the Twentieth-Century West 221Douglas Flamming 13 The West and Workers, 1870–1930 240James N. Gregory 14 Societies to Match the Scenery: Twentieth-Century Environmental History in the American West 256Dan Flores 15 Where to Draw the Line? The Pacific, Place, and the US West 271Chris Friday 16 Religion and the American West 286Philip Goff 17 Transients and Stickers: The Problem of Community in the American West 304Anne Hyde 18 American Indians in the Twentieth Century 329Peter Iverson 19 The New Deal’s West 346Karen R. Merrill 20 Art, Ideology, and the West 361Douglas R. Nickel 21 “The West Plays West”: Western Tourism and the Landscape of Leisure 375Marguerite S. Shaffer 22 Hispanics and Latinos 390Ramón A. Gutiérrez 23 City Lights: Urban History in the West 412Robert O. Self 24 Politics and the Twentieth-Century American West 442William Deverell 25 The Literary West and the Twentieth Century 460David M. Wrobel Bibliography 481 Index 553

William Deverell is Professor of History at the University of Southern California and director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. He is the author of Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910 (1994) and Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (2004). He co-authored Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region (2000) and The West in the History of the Nation (2000) and co-edited California Progressivism Revisited (1994) and Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s (2001).

A Companion to the American West is a rigorous, illuminating introduction to the history of the American West. Twenty-five essays by expert scholars synthesize the best and most provocative work in the field. Each essay covers a subtopic of western American history, its major concerns, and its major works to provide a comprehensive overview of themes and historiography. The essays not only come from the perspective of the “new western history,” reflecting a resurgence in both scholarly and public interest in the region, but also reflect other schools and positions, such as ethnic studies, cultural studies, and subfields of environmental and gender history. The Companion covers such topics as industrialism, women, Native Americans, exploration, religion, politics, and art. Also included is a combined bibliography to aid further research. The essays are lively, well written, and suited to the student, scholar, and all interested readers of the history of the American West.